What do magic and LEGO® have to do with innovation? At HBS Executive Education’s Leading Product Innovation program, the answer is: “everything.”

The rationale behind the continuous changes to Harvard Business School Executive Education’s Leading Product Innovation program is simple: “How can we effectively teach innovation if our program is not innovative?” Faculty Chair Stefan Thomke explains: “When people come here, their expectations are already quite high. These are senior executives, many with decades of experience and proven track records of success, and they’re at Harvard Business School. So, of course, they expect the program and the faculty to be great. But our objective is to exceed those expectations, create a ‘wow’ factor, and provide an element of surprise.”

Stefan H Thomke Faculty Chair of Harvard Business School

Since its inception in 1991, when it was known as Leading Product Development, this program has been focused on identifying the best practices in the field of innovation. While many of these originate in product-based industries, they’re equally applicable to service industries. Although executives from product companies still make up the largest proportion of the audience, the program always attracts participants from service companies—a trend that is expected to continue.

Expect the unexpected

Thomke explains how the program evolves every year. “New cases and materials are de rigueur—we always do that. But at LPI, we take it a step further by creating one-of-a-kind experiences. I can’t give away all of our surprises, but I can share with you a little background on two experiential exercises that have been incredibly successful at LPI.

“For starters, I’ve developed an exciting class on customer experience design that centers around LEGO® bricks. When I conducted research for a LEGO® case study, I learned about a methodology called LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP). In LSP, specially designed LEGO® kits are used to facilitate strategy building, vision setting, and problem-solving sessions for business executives. It’s based on the learning premise of the mind-hand connection, that is, when you use your hands to build things, the nature of learning changes.”

The teacher becomes the student

While he found the LEGO® concept very intriguing, Thomke quickly deduced that the LSP format would not work in HBS’s signature classroom environment. Realizing that the only way he could teach it was to experience it himself, he did what he’d advised so many others to do over the years: he went back to school. He ultimately obtained two LSP facilitator certifications and says he then spent a few months “busting his brain” and experimenting to adjust the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® experience for LPI. The result? A 90-minute session on how to design and build magical customer experiences using (what else?) LEGO® bricks. “What we’ve learned is that, after moving up the ladder, many executives are focused on left-brain activities—organizational structure and functions, for instance,” Thomke observes. “While they may have been more creative in school or when they were just starting out, most executives have few opportunities to engage in such right-brain activities.

“When I ask participants what are their big takeaways from the LEGO® session, they invariably tell me that it’s transformational. Aside from learning about tangible design principles, it forces them to look at a service or product experience through the eyes of a customer and get a much better sense of their emotional journey.”
Making innovation magic

Sometimes, learning new things requires that you go to other fields for inspiration. “Several years ago, I came upon the realization that magicians can be some of the best innovators,” says Thomke. “Night after night, they have to come up with new tricks in order to entertain and wow their audience. I had the great fortune to run into Jason Randal, one of the world’s foremost close-up magicians. Not only is he an amazing magician and charismatic person, he’s also a great innovator.”

“Over the years, he’s actually developed a set of innovation principles that work. So we got together and over the course of many months, we developed a common set of principles that work well for innovation and are inspired by what magicians like Jason do,” says Thomke.

This collaboration has resulted in a magical learning experience—refined over the course of several years—that causes executives to let go of their assumptions and embrace new ways of thinking. He says, “When you get down to it, this class is not about helping someone lead a team or manage a portfolio, it’s about helping the participant become a more effective innovator—period.”

Yielding valuable takeaways

But it’s not just fun and games at LPI. Participants leave the program with a set of very practical, yet powerful, innovation principles that they can put into practice right away. Says Thomke, “People tell me that they tape these principles to the wall as a reminder of how they should behave as individuals. My primary objective is to create an educational experience that changes the way participants think, feel, and act. And based on what we’re seeing and hearing, it’s happening—every day, in every session.”

Stefan H. Thomke is William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration. Member of the Technology and Operations Management Unit; and faculty chair of HBS Executive Education in India, “Driving Growth Through Innovation—India”, and “Leading Product Innovation.”. He is the co-author of HBS case studies: LEGO, and LEGO, the Crisis

Nicky Riley (@Nicky_Riley) is Programme Manager at University of the Arts London. She manages university timetabling initiative and recently organised a LEGO SERIOUS PLAY assisted workshop, which was facilitated by Sean Blair from ProMeet. This LEGO SERIOUS PLAY case study describing their workshop was originally published in her blog.

Academic and Timetabling colleagues at LCC used Lego Serious Play to explore the complex system that is timetabling last week. Using Lego to build models and share understanding of timetabling from different perspectives, the group explored what is and isn’t working in relation to timetabling and what we could be doing better.

Image: Collaboration & innovative course delivery works!

This session highlighted a number of key areas for improvement including:

joining everything together better (processes around course planning and delivery are not aligned and make lives difficult for everyone)

making better decisions (management decisions don’t seem to take into account the reality of delivering course timetables and timetabling teams aren’t involved in crucial learning space discussions and decisions)

working together better (timetabling works best when people work collaboratively)

improving student experiences (student experiences are inconsistent)

encouraging innovation and improvement (timetabling does not support risk-taking and innovation but this is needed to make better use of space)

Image: Timetabling in Lego

The great thing about Lego Serious Play in this context was that it allowed the group to have an adult conversation about the timetabling system without judgement or blame on individuals or groups of staff. The group remained focused on exploring the issues and employing creative problem solving to identify areas for improvement. The group was also unanimous on one thing – the main success factor behind timetabling is the people! The effective and helpful timetabling team and their collaborative work with course teams and students was highlighted during the workshop as something that works well and should not be changed.

Harvest Project – Case Study

Read, see, and hear, how Strategic Play Group Ltd. in North America, are using LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology and materials to support the work of the charity board at Harvest Project!

Harvest Project reaches out to individuals and families on Metro-Vancouver’s North Shore who are challenged by family break-down, illness, job loss and poverty. They work to provide client-care coaching and counsel, grocery and clothing support, and emergency drop-in help. They work hard to impact the community by breaking the poverty cycle and restoring people to participate in work school, and a healthier family life.

The Executive Director, Gary Ansell, approached the StrategicPlay® Group Ltd., to work with the Board of Directors. Gary identified that Harvest Project had a fuzzy situation. The fuzzy problem facing the organization is as complex as the concept of poverty. How does the face of poverty on the North Shore present today? How might that emerge or change? How can Harvest best serve and have the best possible impact? How can Harvest Project prepare for the future?

During 2015, members of the Strategic Play team have provided LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshops, Executive Coaching, and Creative Problem Solving using the Basadur challenge mapping approach. We are using highly visual and interactive tools to gain 100% of stakeholder engagement. Specifically, the sessions conducted to date include working to answer the following questions:

Current Situation Analysis: What is the state of poverty on the North Shore right now?

What is the impact of poverty on the North Shore, right now in real time?

What is our vision for the future?

Who are our clients? Why do they come?

What do our clients truly need from Harvest Project?

Are we meeting those needs?

What are our goals?

How are we measuring what we are doing?

The board members of Harvest Project have kindly shared their story and video case. Here is what Gary Ansell, Executive Director, had to say about one of the events.

“Intended Impact Statement work done at a board level of a charity appears enormous and daunting within the constraints of a not for profit. It requires that very busy people volunteering their valuable time engage quickly and efficiently in a process where everyone lean in and contribute their story yet simultaneously build one consensual story for the organization. I do not know of a more effective process to give the best chance of achieving this than LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®.”

In rehearsals, the actors try together with the director to enter as deep as possible into the character he/she will present on stage. There are a lot of different — even contradictory —philosophies and acting schools how to do stage character profiling. The most famous one is the Stanislavski Method — taught by Lee Strasberg as Method Acting.

The main objective of these exercises is to develop a sense for motivations and actions of the character: “Why does he/she behaves in certain situations or circumstances?” — “What defines his/her personality” — “What is driving him/her?”

As you image, all these training are very time-consuming since the actor has to train his/her concentration and his/her senses so that he/she may respond freely to the total stage environment.

Having a long time experience working in off-theater groups as actor and director I took a new approach to stage character profiling for the theater die gewissen, a theater group I work with since years and has this year 50-th anniversary.

I combined Lego Serious Play to model metaphorical the stage character role with Moving Motivators, a method from Management 3.0, to identify what motivates each individual character.

The benefit of the approach: within only 2,5 hours we elaborated with 11 actors their complete role profile and each character’s intrinsic motivations.

What a fantastic journey! Six professional from across Europe, all with a rich inter- and multicultural background found the way to Billund through LinkedIn and Eventbrite to become certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitator. All of them had already a strong track record as creativity and innovation facilitators, HR managers, CEOs of multinational companies, management consultants, psychologists, educators, and all of them were fascinated by the magic of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®.

Together with our skilled and passionate trainer, Micael Buckle from IntHRface and the fantasy world and hospitality in and around Hotel Legoland we explored the magic and the power of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology in this 4-day workshop. It felt like a roller coaster ride – really deep and experiential learning and always a perfect flow, which you will rarely get in traditional learning and meeting environments.

Under the slogan “Give your brain a hand” we experienced the power of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Real Time Strategy and Real Time Identity through co-creating individual and shared business models, stories, and interconnected landscapes. We learned to detect emergency situation, to take shared decisions, and to find solutions and Simple Guided Principles for problem solving and business development. We all developed skills to use our hands, helping to get to a deeper subconscious layer, to create metaphors and tell our stories.

We are all convinced of the power of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® in many business and educational processes, e.g. for start-up/business model canvassing, for personal and team- development in any organization, public or private, for project management, for leadership skills development, for product and service development, for sales and marketing, for organisational and cultural change. The method builds on evidence-based research and on the pedagogical theories of constructivism and constructionism.

Ready for taking off? If you want to unleash your or your teams creativity and turn issues and challenges into successful and sustainable solutions with the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology, just get in touch, drop us a line at LSP@start-up-europe.com. Our team will customise and design the most effective workshop for your needs!

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